The overwhelming support given by the UN General Assembly to the resolution to hand Libya’s seat to the National Transitional Council confirms that there is an almost total worldwide consensus that the NTC is now de facto the government of our southern neighbour. A total of 114 states voted in favour of the resolution, 17 voted against and 15 abstained.
Nobody today is in a position to lecture anybody else about what is good for them- Mario Vella
Speaking against a motion aimed at postponing this decision – a motion rightly voted into the dustbin of history – the Egyptian representative argued that this was “the moment of truth”. Failure to give Libya’s seat to the NTC without any further ado, would only serve to prolong the suffering of the Libyan people and to frustrate their will.
There is no doubt that this has been an important step forward but it is by no means the end of the story, far from it. International recognition of the NTC as a government is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for Libya’s return to normality.
This is especially true if “normality” is to mean not more of the same but the successful establishment of democratic institutions that can ensure stability while promoting the change that most Libyans have been yearning for. Considering that Libyans have never really enjoyed such a state of “normality”, perhaps the phrase “return to normality” is inappropriate.
One thing is certain. Any idea that the templates of these institutions can be exported to Libya from elsewhere – be this from the West or from anywhere in the Islamic world – is widely off the mark. Nobody today is in a position to lecture anybody else about what is good for them. Which is not to say that some will not try.
They will try because within the footprint of these 1.8 million square kilometres lie what are possibly the seventh largest proven oil reserves in the world. A January 2011 estimate puts them at 46.4 billion barrels, certainly the largest reserves in Africa. Then there is gas too, about 55 trillion cubic feet of it, and other mineral resources. There are, for example, sufficiently robust indications of enough uranium to make it worthwhile for Canadian, French, Russian and Ukrainian companies to have signed exploration agreements with the regime.
The undoubted economic interest of the world’s great powers in Libya – which interests only the hopelessly naïve or the callously hypocritical will deny – does not justify opposition to UN Security Council’s Resolution 1973 of March 17. It is true that the language of the resolution authorising “all necessary measures” to “protect civilians and civilian-populated areas under threat of attack” allows for interpretation when push comes to shove. But could it be otherwise?
Insisting with the Libyans – that rose against Muammar Gaddafi because they had enough of his corrupt dictatorship – that they should not ask for Nato to take “all necessary measures” to prevent the Colonel’s armed forces from killing them, is effectively to prop up a violent regime against the wish of the people.
It hurts to hear people who should know better defend Col Gaddafi. When Tripoli fell, Bayardo Arce, an economic advisor to Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, is reported to have told a journalist who asked him if Nicaragua would welcome Col Gaddafi: “If someone asks us for asylum, we would have to consider it positively, because our people got asylum when the Somoza dictatorship was killing us”.
What an insult to the Sandinistas who died in the struggle to free Nicaragua from the dictator Anastasio Somoza in the 1970s! If there is anyone in the Libyan context that can be compared to Somoza it is Col Gaddafi himself. Also, don’t some of the Colonel’s sons remind you of Somoza’s son, nicknamed El Chigüin, who in 1978 was almost certainly involved in the assassination of La Prensa’s editor Pedro Chamorro?
I have been watching Libya even more closely than usual ever since the first demonstrations in Tunisia in December last year. Contrary to the assurances of many of our own home-spun know-alls in business, civil service and politics in or around both parties – who swore that nothing could ever happen in Libya – it was clear to others that the Arab Spring would not spare Col Gaddafi.
True, I have the advantage of having been born there in a family that, from one side, had come down from Europe and settled in Tripolitania even before the Italian invasion, when it was still a Vilayet (province) of the Ottoman Empire. That sort of background teaches you something about political change in the country. It gives you a broader and more long-term view.
True, I also have the advantage of having to observe developments in Libya for professional purposes. But those that assured us that Libya could not change or that, at best, someone of “the family” or an old army comrade would be brought in from the cold to replace him (say a Jalloud), were meant to know Libya well. The problem is that we Maltese, in spite of our vaunted experience of Libya, never ventured beyond that thin crust of Libyan society that constituted Gaddafi’s power-base.
The fall of the regime is only the beginning of a difficult but exciting journey. As I told a young friend who was in one of the first NTC teams to arrive in Tripoli from Benghazi to take over public administration: “You are privileged to be living a historic moment and I confess that I envy you for it.”
The third article on Lord Strickland that should have appeared today will be published in two weeks’ time.
Dr Vella blogs at http://watersbroken.wordpress.com .